I am new at working with Microsoft Azure and I am trying to open a Notebook from the Azure Machine learning studio.
Every time I try to create a new compute it says Creation failed so I cannot work. My region is francecentral and I have tried different Virtual Machine size
Your reason might be explained here:
As demand continues to grow, if we are faced with any capacity
constraints in any region during this time, we have established clear
criteria for the priority of new cloud capacity. Top priority will be
going to first responders, health and emergency management services,
critical government infrastructure organizational use, and ensuring
remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of
Teams.
If you qualify for this category, you should reach out to Azure Support or your Microsoft representative. If not, you need to keep retrying (might work better at night) or try a different region.
Related
When Azure shuts down a VM for planned maintenance, what messages do running services see, if any?
For example, do they get a ServiceBase.OnShutdown() message and, if so, how long does the service / server get to complete shutdown processing?
Does MS give any extra leeway to its own apps? E.g. if a VM is running SQL Server, will Azure wait for SQL Server to stop cleanly before shutting down the VM?
[I can't find this in the documentation and, unfortunately, I don't have the access or the programming skills to try it out for myself.]
what messages do running services see, if any?
Based on my knowledge, for now, Azure does not support this. Please refer to this feedback.
Typically maintenance is performed at weekends for VMs not in an availability set to minimize impact on services. Normally notification is given 7 days in advance with the minimum being 3 business days. A start time for the maintenance is given with the expected duration. More information please refer to this link.
According to your description, I suggest you could provision another IaaS VM with your SQL server and put in the same Availability set. By doing this, Azure will ensure that both your VMs do not go down simultaneously.
We are working on architecture of new web application to be hosted on Azure. This application would run only in day time (Say 9AM to 5PM). What I read so far about Azure is we would continue be billed even when we stop the deployment.
However in case of Azure VM (IAAS) billing stops when we stop the VM.
Client is keenly interested in running the IT cost to the minimum. We are planning to use WASABi/Auto-scaling block to auto shutdown & auto-start the app to run only during (9AM-5PM)
Deploying application every morning & deleting every evening even programmatically doesn't sound like a good architecture.
Should we target the app for VM rather than Azure web role?
While hourly billing cost is definitely a consideration and it is true that if you stop a VM in IaaS, billing stops, there are other considerations as well. Some of them are:
With Cloud Services, you have to architect the application in a certain way to take advantage of statelessness there. So there may be a bit of a learning curve there. With Virtual Machines, in theory you can build an application the way you are used to and deploy that in the cloud.
With Cloud Services, the major advantage is that you don't have to maintain the VM. This is something Microsoft does that for you. So there's little or no IT-admin overhead. With VMs, maintaining the VM is your responsibility so that's an additional cost which is recurring as well (assuming you (or your client) have an IT Admin kind of guy on the payroll).
Generally speaking, if the application is a stand-alone application with quite simple deployment topology and is brand new application it is recommended that you write them as Cloud Service but do take the costs (development / IT admin) into consideration as well.
When you stop the virtual machine through a standard shutdown (through the machine itself for example), it does continue to incur charges. The portal will eventually show it as shutdown, but the VM still has resources allocated.
However, if you stop the machine through the portal, API, or PowerShell, it will stop and DEALLOCATE the machine. This means the VM will use storage space, but will not incur compute charges.
Simply schedule the deallocation of the machines during off-hours, and you will only page for the usage during the day.
I run my own uk based hosting and web design company.
We have about 10 physical servers in a DC in the UK and host about 300 or so web sites, email servers and web applications. They are all on a windows server platform with a few linux VM's.
I now have a Windows Azure account, I have set up a medium windows 2008 server within my azure account and want to start using it to maybe host and migrate some of my web sites and services onto my azure account and new server. With the view that maybe I could move ALL my services over and get rid of the need for any of my physical servers in the DC.
My question that I am still really struggling with how much this will really cost me on an ongoing basis.
The billing area, doesnt really tell me much as it simply shows my bill as £0.00. It shows my usage but I am really struggling to compare the resources I am currently using compared to how its billed in azure? It doesnt even show me what it would have cost me if I werent ona trial.
I dont want to move web hosted sites over if its going to cost me more than hosting in my current DC.
I was thinking of moving many sites onto the new server i have set up as its a better spec than a few of my current servers, so would see a big benefit, I even considered setting up a much larger Server in my Azure account but again unsure as to the real cost of that box its hard to compare.
Do I simply need to look at the calculator and select the number of servers i wil deploy, select how much storage I need and bandwidth? Or do I need to look at the items in the billing area as well - such as:
Compute units,Storage Transactions,Data Transfer Out,Data Transfer In
When I set up the server it didnt ask me for how much storage I wanted it just set it up with about 150GB avaialble in the actual server.
Any advice as I really see this as something i want to use over the next 12 months, but not if once i have finally migrated stuff its going to cost me more than my normal hosting and i have to move stuff all back at the end of the 12 months.
Cheers
Because you're using Windows Azure Virtual Machines, you should first use the virtual machine pricing calculator. This calculator only displays the costs that are relevant for your scenario except for the storage transaction cost. Here is a breakdown of the costs you'll have to consider:
Virtual Machines
The Virtual Machine cost appears on the bill as compute units. Throughout the Windows Azure Virtual Machine preview, the cost per core per hour is $0.08. Once VMs reach general availability, the cost will be $0.115 per core per hour for Windows VMs and $0.085 for Linux VMs. Using the calculator, you can see that a medium instance uses two cores and will therefore be billed at $0.16 per hour during the preview period. You will have to use your best judgement to determine how many virtual machines you'll need and how large they should be.
Storage
You will have to pay for the data actually used within your VHDs. Let's assume you have one virtual machine with one VHD attached. If the size of the VHD 200GB, but only 100GB is used, you will have to pay for 100GB per month.
Bandwidth
Microsoft now only charges for egress data transfers (data going out of the data center). With this pricing change, the Data Transfer In section of the billing area will always be 0.00. Hopefully, you already have a good idea about your current outbound data usage. If so, you can calculate your bandwidth cost by simply moving the bandwidth slider to the correct spot.
Storage Transactions
If you scroll down to the Transactions section of this blog post, you'll see how storage transactions are counted. Basically, you count one transaction per write operation and possibly one transaction per read operation depending if the data is cached or not. The cost of storage transactions are negligible because you only have to pay one cent per 100,000 transactions. That's why storage transactions are left out of the calculator.
HTH
To answer such question in an input box has limitation to express in details. The cost calculator is there to give you an estimate of upper limit about what the cost will be if your usage are under selected limit. Based on my personal experiences if you choose higher limits of usage and keep the usages within your forecast limits, there will be no hidden charges. But the reality could be far different because you may not estimate the usages correctly at first and this could change the cost later.
For moving a traditional web hosting solution to Windows Azure, latest release of Windows Azure Virtual Machine is best fit as this requires minimum migration complexity. So the VM size you will choose will have fixed resources (compute, local storage, network bandwidth, disk I/O etc) and the cost will be fixed as long as you are under limit so there will not be unseen charges.
Windows Azure Storage is pay as you go (ranges ~$0.012/GB depend on usage limit) and there is no limit. When moving from traditions web hosting to Cloud environment, due to application architecture design, I have seen less Cloud storage usage and more VM storage so it may not cost a lot.
The place you will see cost variation is data egress/ingress and it is difficult to forecast as it is all depend on application usage, so this is something you will have to account as variable cost.
You can also contact Windows Azure Virtual Machine Forum where dedicated Windows Azure Virtual Machine resources are available to answer your such questions.
Finally One thing I would also add that Windows Azure Virtual Machines are still in preview mode so it would be best to bring some of your business to Windows Azure VM as trial and testing purpose because now matter what you think you may encounter problems (because it is preview release) and this could case service disruption.
I'm considering to join the Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special, but I'm a little bit afraid of losing money with it. I don't wanna develop any fancy large scale application, I want to join just to learn Azure and do my experiments, what should I be afraid of?
In the transference, it says: "Data Transfers (per region)", what does that mean?
Can I put limits to stop the app if it goes over this plan in order to avoid get charged?
Can it be "pre pay" instead "bill pay"?
Would it be enough for a blog?
Any experiencie so far?
Kind regards.
As ligget pointed out, Azure isn't cost affect as a host for an application that can be easily deployed to a traditional shared hosting provider. Azure's target market are those that want dedicated resources without the need to micro-manage the infrasture and the capability to easily scale up/down based on demand.
That said, here's the answers to the questions you posted:
Data Transfers are based on bandwidth in and out of the hosting data center. bandwidth for communication occuring within components (SQL Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Storage, etc...) in the same datacenter are not billable.
Your usage is not currently capped when the free quotas are used up. However, you will recieved warning emails when those items approach their usage threadsholds.
There is the option to pay your subscription using a PO, but the minimum threshold for most of these operations is $500/month. So as a hobbyist, its unlikely you're wanting that route.
The introductory special does not provide enough resources for hosting a 24x7 personal blog. That level includes only 25hrs of compute resources. Each hour a single instance of your application is deployed will count against this, even if the application received no traffic. Think of it like renting office space. You still pay rent on the office even if there are no customers there.
All this said, there's still much to be learned with the introductory special. The azure development tools allows you to work with Windows Azure and Azure storage locally and get a feel for how they work. The introductory special then lets you deploy those solutions so you can see what works and what doesn't (not everything that works locally works hosted).
I would recommend you host your blog somewhere else - it's a waste of resources running it on Azure and you'll find much cheaper options. A recently introduced extra small instance would be a better choice in this case, but AFAIK it is charged separately as of now, e.g. even when you have an MSDN subscription those extra small instance hours do not count towards free Azure hours that come with the subscription.
There is no pre-pay option I know of and it's not possible to stop the app automatically. It'll be running until the deployment is deleted (beware! even if suspended/stopped the deployment will continue to accrue charges). I believe you will be sent a notification shortly before reaching your free hours threshold.
Be aware that when launching more than 1 instance you are charged for every hour of every instance combined. This can happen for example when you have more than one role in your Azure project (1 web role + 1 worker role - a separate instance will be started for each role).
Data trasfer means your entire data trasfer: blobs/Table storage/queues (transfers between your hosted service and storage account inside the same data center are free) + whatever data is transfered in/out of your hosted application, e.g. when somebody visits your pages. When you create storage accounts and hosted services in Azure you will specify a region that will be hosting your account/app - hosting in Asia is slightly more expensive than in Europe/U.S.
Your best bet would be to contact Microsoft with these questions.
Is there a way do do dynamic elasticity in Windows Azure? If my workers begin to get overloaded, or queues start to get too full, or too many workers have no work to do, is there a way to dynamically add or remove workers through code or is that just done manually (requires human intervention) right now? Does anyone know of any plans to add that if its not currently available?
Microsoft shipped the Autoscaling Application Block (Wasabi) to provide dynamic scaling. Some of the supported scenarios:
Autoscaling both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically changing instance counts or performing application throttling.
Autoscaling Windows Azure roles based on timetables.
Autoscaling Windows Azure roles based on metrics collected from the application and/or Windows Azure but constrained by upper and lower bounds on the instance count per role.
Preventing fast oscillations in the number of role instances with the stabilizer. The stabilizer can also help to optimize costs by limiting scaling up operations to the beginning of the hour and scaling down operations to the end of the hour.
Monitoring and logging autoscaling activity.
Sending notifications to preview any scaling operations before they take place.
Encrypting the rules and other configuration in Windows Azure blob storage or in local file storage.
Managing the autoscaler configuration by using Windows PowerShell.
A comprehensie sample application (Tailspin Surveys) showcasing all these features is provided (installation instructions are available here). Also, check out the Developer's Guide and the Channel9 video walkthrough.
The block is available as standalone download of binaries, source or via NuGet.
Here are a couple of talks/demos showing Wasabi in action:
CloudCover Episode on autoscaling
p&p symposium talk "Windows Azure app scaling to need"
There's a Service Management API, and you can use that to scale your application (from code running in Windows Azure or from code running outside of Windows Azure).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460799.aspx and http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=windowsazuresamples&ReleaseId=3233.
Windows Azure has just added the autoscaling feature built into the platform. Now it's trivially easy to configure your autoscaling rules right in the management portal:
See the announcement and the demo. I've also written a post comparing Windows Azure Autoscale to Wasabi and outlining the path forward.
Create a queue named autoscale.[your_role_name].instance_count
In the Management Portal, set the autoscale to Queue.
Set the Target Count field to 1.
Now you can use standard enqueue and dequeue operations on that queue to control the number of worker role instances. You've got 7 days to process a message before it expires, so you might want to create a worker role that can ensure that the number of messages in the queue is tracking your target instance count.
If you're after dynamic elasticity, you've probably already got a worker-role-based controller in mind already, so that's probably not a problem.
Lokad.Cloud open source project for Windows Azure contains distributed executor framework. Among other things it provides auto-scaling with VM provisioning feature.